For many years I wandered through my career, jumping on various opportunities as they came along, but without a real “direction” for where I was going.

I was fortunate in that I made some good choices – getting into bioinformatics early on, and then getting into proteomics early on – before the fields became popular. But, despite the outward success this has brought to me, I’ve often struggled with, “who am I?”

For years the “who am I?” question was subsumed by goals, the latest being “getting tenure.”

But here’s the thing I realized once I had achieved that goal: I was doing it, because it was the thing to do. Not because it fit into some kind of “grand plan” for my life.

I’m glad to have done that, but after doing it, I felt a noticeable void: what next?

Tenure is a huge goal for many people, and a lot of those I’ve spoken to after they got tenure felt that it was anti-climactic.

I would go one step beyond that – it is a “life crisis” inducing event if you’ve been focused on it too much.

That’s why it is so important to have a picture of your ultimate life and goals in mind – hopefully before going for tenure (or going for the faculty job, or the postdoc job, or graduate school – or, anything!)

Because then, when you achieve one goal, you can move onto the next goal that fits into your grand plan – rather than just finding yourself having completed this big thing, and wondering, “what next?”

In my own case of assessing “what next?” and “who do I really want to be?” I’ve figured out a few things:
1. I enjoy writing – I have a whole slew of books to write, and I’ve been reenergized in getting my first book done so that I can move onto the next one. The first book is titled “The Golden Ticket in Science: Funding and Recognition Through The Power of Marketing”. Keep your eye out, or sign up for my mailing list if you want early access (that’s the big subscribe box on the upper left).

2. I enjoy helping people become better at what they do. While I used to think that I enjoyed programming computers, I’ve realized the challenge of “programming” people for success is both bigger and more rewarding for me.

That’s why I’m doing this whole blog thing (and my grant writing course http://tinyurl.com/3a8uhzq
, and future courses to yet be named). To help you be more proactive in your own life, and achieve your goals. Yeah – it sounds rah rah (like a cheerleader), but sometimes cheerleading is necessary.

Besides, I want more happy, proactive scientists out there solving the important problems in our world – and less unhappy, reactive scientists who struggle with things.

So go out and be proactive. Define who you want to be when you grow up. And then start moving towards it!

Morgan was invited to participate in a meeting designed to give feedback to the NIH for the future of informatics for handling the flood of data from the “post genome” era of biology. It is a huge challenge. But in the meeting, the primary focus was all about the machines – hardware and software that it will take to get it done. I was a bit frustrated that there wasn’t more about the “people” in the meeting, for reasons I discuss on the video.

The genome era is an incredible time to be in science, but also presents unprecedented challenges.   With the publishing of the first complete human genome just about 10 years ago, major questions remain, such as:

• Where are all the genes located on the genome?
• How and when are the genes regulated?
• How are those genes spliced to form different variants of genes?
• Which of the genes encode proteins, and which encode other functional RNAs?

It turns out that “sequencing a genome” was only a starting point, not an end point.  There’s a lot of work to do.

The National Institutes of Health is now supporting a project by the name “ENcyclopedia of DNA Elements,” whose goal is to ultimately solve many of these riddles, providing us with sufficient insights on genomes and their genes that we can start bringing the genome era to improve health care.

The ENCODE project is large and ambitious – and today is the kickoff of the project’s annual meeting in Washington DC.

Highlights of the first day of the meeting include: presentations from Ewan Birney and Manolis Kellis on preliminary analyses of the large data sets being generated, a presentation from Eric Green, leader of the Nat. Human Genome Research Institute about the future of the project, and highlights from a variety of researchers (including yours truly) about various data generation and analysis efforts for the project.  These data generation efforts include: transcription mapping by RNAseq, histone mapping, studies of heterocrhomatin, examination of alternative splicing, and analysis of protein expression.

While the meeting is exciting, it is clear that nobody has a handle on the data analysis challenges (no slight to Ewan, Manolis, or the other folks intended here – I’m just highlighting the huge nature of the problem).  Each research group is producing data at a tremendous clip, and while there is a “Data Coordination Center” for the project through which all the data flows and is tracked, trying to put it all together is going to take years.

Who will do that work?  I am concerned about it, because this kind of work is not suited for most university environments.  It requires a significant long-term investment in computing and software infrastructure.  Universities like my own are notoriously bad at long-term planning.  And the short funding cycles now provided by the NIH exacerbate that problem, since continuity for more than 2-3 years is almost never assured.

I think that the solution will have to be some kind of institutes and/or commercial ventures that are developed for this purpose.  These need to be separate from the pressures of academic science, which is a constant publish-or-perish affair, making it hard to focus on long-term infrastructure development.  Developing such infrastructure requires extraordinary focus and long-term thinking, and doesn’t lend itself well to the constant publishing required by academia.

Perhaps that’s part of the reason that Ewan Birney has been so successful at the European Bioinformatics Institute – it is not a traditional academic setting.  I think we need to replicate his successes here in the US.

I just saw a neat talk by Eric Schadt, PhD who is the Chief Scientific Officer of Pacific Biosciences.  First he showed off the new sequencing technology they are developing, which promises to absolutely blow away the current “next-generation” sequencing technologies.  They use a micro (or maybe nano?) fabricated waveguide to isolate a single polymerase molecule, then they use fluorescently labeled nucleotides with a cleavable linker.  When each nucleotide comes into the polymerase for incorporation into the growing DNA string, there is a short pulse of light from the fluorescent marker, before it gets cleaved.  This platform is now coming to maturity for real-world DNA sequencing.  It will probably be the next “next generation” sequencing.  Or should it be called “third generation” sequencing?

So, that’s neat and all, but what I want to discuss is the second part of his talk.  They combined the genome information from this new approach with other types of “systems biology” data to begin finding gene networks that were perturbed in health conditions.  He showed results of one study focused on obesity, where they pinpointed several new genes associated with adipose (fat) storage.  From that, they have developed a drug that may prevent obesity and weight gain.

I saw this talk after just having biked into work, having hundreds of cars zoom past with people in them getting no exercise whatsoever.  So here this company is – like many others – developing a new drug that may prevent weight gain, when the real problem for many people (except the rare few with a genetic condition) is lifestyle.

I’ve just read the book “Vitamin D Cure” that discusses how many “modern diseases” (you know, the ones that didn’t much exist 100 years ago) are associated by lack of sunlight and hence lack of vitamin D.  So it turns out that many diseases – ranging from heart disease to cancer to gallbladder disease – are associated with chronic D deficiency.  That’s a lifestyle issue.  Are we going to “drug” that too?  Artificial sunshine in a drug?  Wait, that’s already been done, and it is called vitamin D.

I get frustrated at the prevalent point of view that we can “drug” every problem known to humankind.   For one, if we do “drug” every problem, then people’s lifespans will get longer.  Now that may be ok if the population didn’t keep growing, but it does.  The world already has 7 billion people, and it is increasingly clear that our ecosystems are being quite strained by that.  If people live longer – and nobody stops having kids – then we’re going to be in ever and ever bigger mess competing over scarcer and scarcer resources (think oil, fisheries, natural gas, water – basically, all the stuff that keeps us alive and healthy).  This will be especially true if people keep driving cars everywhere.

On the one hand, it seems good to help people by making a new drug.  But on the other hand, it may not help in the big picture.  I don’t know how to reconcile these two views.

But there’s also another issue, which is cost.  New drugs are extremely costly to develop.  Once this new drug is developed, who will be able to afford it?  Maybe a few rich people will be able to pay for this, and a few rare cases of medically necessary/genetically obese people.  But will the rest of the population, who are overweight simply because of their lifestyle choices?  Should health insurance pay for a very expensive new drug just because many people choose to drive everywhere and never get exercise?  I don’t think so.  Why not ask for health insurance to just start paying for cosmetic surgery as well?  I think it would be better for folks to just start riding their bikes more.

My research is fun, and will hopefully benefit people – but will it really help in the big picture?

Sometimes I wonder about that.